


Law of Conservation of Energy

by rybari



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Character Study basically, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-26
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-09 12:29:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5539997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rybari/pseuds/rybari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tuuri Hotakainen was born curious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Law of Conservation of Energy

**Author's Note:**

> um, this is almost completely unedited, so I may come back and kick it into better shape. I wanted to write a homage to my best gal.

White sky. It was dull with snow, unbroken save for the long thin trail of smoke billowing from the tank.

Tuuri cut the engine and opened the driver’s seat door. She dropped down to the snow, yelping as it came up over her ankles and ice trickled into her boots. Not a second later, Sigrun was already prying open the hood, coughing as exhaust puffed into her face. Tuuri floundered next to her, trying to catch a glimpse of what had happened.

It didn’t look good.

“They sold us a heap of GARBAGE!” Sigrun declared, slamming the hood closed. Tuuri jerked her fingers out of the way just in time. “Call the old people! I’m going to yell at them!”

“Erm.” Tuuri said, trying to open the hood again. “I think you may have to get Mikkel to run the radio.”

Sigrun paused, the smallness of her team once again impressed upon her. “Riiiiight, you have like three jobs on this run. You gonna be okay with this kind of engine?”

“They brought a Danish engine to Keuruu once.” Tuuri said absently, comparing her memory of schematics to the metal guts in front of her. “I’ll manage.”

“Hmm. Well good thing that we only got a few feet.” Sigrun said. “I’ll get the twig and the little Viking on perimeter. That’ll give you warning if something ugly turns up.”

Tuuri didn’t answer. She thanked Reynir when he was sent to give her tools, and set to work, her mouth set in a determined line.

\--

Tuuri Hotakainen was born curious.

She could read before she could walk, and she mouthed wrenches as a baby rather than the carved wooden rings her cousins teethed on; she’d always taken to the mechanical. Tuuri’s earliest memory was of chasing words, following the letters of a worn chapter book with her hands as she spoke the sounds in a clear, high voice. Someone chuckled, bouncing her in their lap, the sound deep and thrumming in her little body.

She was pretty sure it was her father who had dandled her on his knee and rumbled like a forge as she practiced her letters. But after Saimaa burned and Onni fought tooth and nail to keep her and Lalli, it was hard not to picture her big brother being patient and safe.

But: Saimaa burned, and so did Lalli’s funny baby toys, carved out of wood and spelled for luck and long life; so did Onni’s old schoolbooks, Icelandic worksheets that he had let Tuuri look at when he was done; and so did the wonderful grandfather clock that stood in the hall, with its solemn tick, tock that Tuuri had always wanted to take apart to see where the tock came from.

So it was no surprise that Onni had a million stories of how she would disappear, often with Lalli after he implored her to look after her tiny cousin, wandering the streets of Keuruu with a book in one hand and Lalli in another. She would amble down the side streets and, if she wasn’t caught, continued until she reached something exciting. The main square, where military scouts would run from building to building as skalds struggled after them with folders piled three or four deep in their arms. The walls of the settlement, big logs still rough with bark in some places, and sentries that always rolled their eyes and shared a cup of tea. Alleyways where cats would fight for scraps, and fight anyone who interfered (she still had the scar on her wrist to prove it). She remembered these adventures as grand, though Onni never seemed to take longer than an hour to locate them. Kids weren’t common in Keuruu; soon everyone grew used to telling Onni that his nine-year-old sister had escaped their apartment again, with his seven-year-old cousin in tow.

It was only ever curiosity. Tuuri would bear the lectures and go to school the next day, mindful of walking with her peers in the morning and trotting dutifully back to the apartment in the afternoon. What she was never curious about was magic.

\--

“Stop!” Tuuri yelped, loosening a nut as fast as she could. The pipe it was attached to stopped rattling ominously, and she touched the tip of her glove to it. It was hot even through the fabric. Mikkel cut the engine, and the tank settled down into its bones again, coughing a few sparks. It wasn’t billowing with smoke, at least. Adjusting the air filter had seen to that.

“I think I may need to look under it.” Tuuri said. Sigrun groaned, splaying dramatically across the dashboard.

“But it’s been ages!” she moaned.

“It’s only been an hour.” Mikkel said mildly. “You can occupy yourself with the car jack, can’t you?”

Sigrun squinted at him. Tuuri smothered a giggle when Sigrun pointed at Mikkel through the windshield. “I can see why you change jobs so much now.”

She disappeared into the back, leaving Tuuri to flap her hands in an attempt to cool the engine down. Sigrun reappeared and started pumping, the jack disappearing in the snow until it finally hit solid ground. Tuuri waited patiently as the chassis lifted, and peered under the front treads with a flashlight.

\--

Being completely unmagical in Finland wasn’t rare, but it wasn’t common either. In Tuuri’s mouth even the most powerful runo was just a phrase. Onni and Lalli took turns walking out in the wilderness with their grandmother. She watched aunts and uncles keep time with their hands as they chanted, silly songs that were meant to help you keep spells straight in your head. She clapped and sang as well, in the end, her eyes remaining pale lavender as her cousins’ burned clear blue.

Tuuri minded, but she couldn’t work with magic. No book in the world, no wrench, no formula could give her something she wasn’t born with. She quizzed her mother on how one could go about finding spirits until she took her hands one day and said, in her quiet burr, “It’s more feeling than fact, love.”

So Tuuri couldn’t call up an icy wind. When she was ten she took apart Onni’s wristwatch and put it back together again, and again, until she knew it inside out. Then she took apart a car engine at fifteen, and didn’t quite put it back together the same way. She spent an hour explaining to the head engineer why one particular truck started quicker than the rest of the fleet. Then she turned to the visiting foreigner, the one wearing a soft, expensive looking cloth tunic, and explained in her shaky Icelandic.

The thing was: magic didn’t like explanation. Tuuri only ever wanted explanation. She wanted to see things with her own eyes, and hear things with her own ears. If she built things she did it with her hands and her tools, each one with a scratch she could name the incident of, if she thought back far enough. She wanted her own translations, her own way of speaking. The Hotakainens, as a clan, were many things, and one of the only traits Tuuri inherited was stubbornness.

\--

“Hmm.”

“What’s hmm?” Sigrun asked, keeping a steady hand on the jack.

“Just have to…” Tuuri leaned under, scooping snow out of her way. “Oh. Nope. Put it back down, Sigrun, I think it’s just the spark plugs.”

“Just?!” Sigrun paused as she levered the tank down. “Don’t those take a long time to replace?”

“Nope.” Tuuri pulled off her glove and felt the engine. Nearly cold. “About two hours, tops.”

Sigrun groaned again, hefting the jack under her arm. “I’m going to go see if the twig needs help patrolling.”

“Sure.” Tuuri said, hefting a ratchet in her spare hand. “I’ll be done soon.”

\--

Tuuri learned once that energy couldn’t be converted to mass, and vice versa. She thought, how odd. Her fingers were rife with kinetic energy that twisted wires and connected radios and didn’t that make something more than the sum of its parts; wasn’t there something so much weightier to hearing something in another language and understanding it, rather than it simply being noise and air?

There were times when she wondered if she would have been happy with magic. If, given the chance, she would trade all her interest for the chance to walk unaided in the dreamworlds; if energy cannot be created or destroyed, did the universe take away hereditary magic and leave her curious and hungry with it? She always laughed at herself for putting it so melodramatically, especially when she stumbled upon diaries from when she was younger. Tuuri could never learn magic, but she learned the unmagic of grease and cogs. She learned the unmagic of short-wave radio and the difference between AM and FM. She learned how to tune a tank, how to change the oil in a car, and bolt turrets to ancient civilian cars brought in for scrap. She learned how to pronounce seven in Swedish.

She twisted the last of the spark plugs into place with her ratchet and closed the hood, placing the old one in her pocket. She climbed into the driver’s seat, turned the ignition, and heard the tank hum to life, no start or cough to be heard. Tuuri stared at her once-pristine white-fingered gloves, covered in oil, and felt a grin split across her face.


End file.
